Tag: Deliberate Practice

Analysis of The Matrix

Let’s start with the numbers. The Matrix has 75 scenes and there are 5 major characters: Neo, Morpheus, Trinity, Agent Smith, and Cypher. The film follows the hero’s journey archetype to a T, so I’m using the hero’s journey model as outlined in my post here.

Setting the Stage

 

Morpheus believes he is the One (0:44)

Trinity and Cypher talk about monitoring Neo while the machines try to trace their location.

  • This is an extraordinarily elegant scene. It avoids the film faux-pas of having a narrator drone out backstory (or even worse, making the audience read a summary), while still explaining all the critical story elements in less than 40 seconds.
  • The exposition is kept interesting by presenting it through a conversation. It earns bonus points by having the conversation between people who disagree.

 

The Agents and police chase Trinity (1:27)

The police and Agents find Trinity and she must fight her way to the exit from the Matrix

  • This scene finishes the work that the opening dialogue started, introducing the villains, superpowers, and key features of the world (such as the exits in and out of the Matrix).

 

Key Takeaways:

  • Conversations are better expositors than description, especially if there’s an interesting social dynamic between the speakers.
  • Don’t be afraid to start the story without the main character and introduce them later.
  • Worldbuilding is best done by using what’s being introduced. Trinity and Morpheus could have simply described the exits in and out of the Matrix, but instead we watch Trinity racing for the ringing phone and disappearing seconds before the hijacked truck pulverizes it.

 

The Ordinary World

 

Follow the white rabbit (6:35)

We see Neo in his normal life as a lone hacker. His computer screen tells us he’s searching for Morpheus. Trinity makes contact with him through his computer. Some of Neo’s illegal clients arrive and, heeding Trinity’s advice, he goes with them to a club.

  • This part of the story continues to build the world, half with visuals and half with conversation.  The atmosphere and objects in Neo’s apartment tell us a great deal about the character. His conversation with his clients fill in any other necessary details. 

 

Key Takeaways:

  • Half tell, half show seems to be the magic ratio, and any telling is done by conversation. The Wachowskis alternate the exposition style, and just by swapping between visuals and conversations they avoid the dreaded info-dump. This implies that it’s not that hard to avoid obvious info dumps – even two techniques, properly contrasted, are enough.  
  • This scene reveals that Neo is on a quest to find the world of adventure. He doesn’t know that’s what he’s doing, but his search for Morpheus (and an answer to his later question, “What is the Matrix?”) drives him out of the ordinary world. I’ve made note of this as a technique – have the hero searching for something related to the world of adventure (probably without knowing the implications of their search), so that they have a clear motivation for entering the world of adventure when it presents itself.

 

Call to Adventure

 

Trinity, the Herald (9:42)

Neo is brought to a club by his clients. Trinity meets Neo at the club and tantalizes him with cryptic talk of the Matrix and Morpheus

  • In this scene Trinity validates Neo’s questing; she lets him know that he is not alone in hearing the call to adventure, and that there really is a world of adventure which will find him, if he wants it to.
  • Trinity helps the story exposition with rapid fire facts, saying that that Neo lives alone, barely eats, barely sleeps, and so on, all in just a few seconds. This is another use of conversation to convey backstory.
  • (Side note: Trinity manipulated Neo to get him into the club, so I’m not counting the lady with the white rabbit tattoo as a herald.)

 

Key Takeaways:

  • The slow build-up here pays dividends. We don’t get any real information, just a bunch of questions that compels the audience to learn more. This is a good practice at the start of any story: introduce as many questions as possible so that the reader will keep going to discover the answers.

 

Refusal of the Call

Awakened by the Alarm (11:57)

Neo’s alarm wakes him up.

 

Be at your desk (12:05)

Neo is chastised by his boss for arriving late

  • This scene wraps up the other half of Neo’s ordinary world by showing his job at a soulless software company.
  • Just as Joseph Campbell pointed out, the ordinary world seems pointless after Trinity delivers the Call to Adventure.

 

At the office (12:55)

A mysterious phone is delivered to Neo. As soon as he opens the package Morpheus calls and warns Neo that the Agents are coming for him. Morpheus tries to guide Neo out of the building, but Neo loses his nerve and is captured.

  • Sticking with Campbell a moment longer, the Agents are obvious Threshold Guardians.
  • Morpheus’s call to Neo is a comically literal call to adventure, but Neo can’t make the leap of faith that would take him across the first threshold.

 

Led out by the police (16:47)

Neo is put in a car by the Agents and police. Trinity observes this, is noticed by an Agent, and flees with a curse.

 

Unable to speak (17:00)

Agent Smith interrogates Neo and tries to coerce him into helping the Agents catch Morpheus. When Neo refuses, they put a tracking bug in him.

  • This scene is Neo’s punishment for refusing the Call to Adventure.

 

Key Takeaways:

  • While the Ordinary World should get fleshed out early in the story, it’s fine to keep developing it up until the hero crosses the first threshold.
  • This scene followed Joseph Campbell’s description of the Refusal of the Call almost to the letter. I still have doubts about his model for later parts of a hero’s journey, but early on it’s safe to follow the path he laid out.

 

Crossing the First Threshold

 

You are the One Neo (21:32)

Neo wakes up after his interrogation as though it was all just a dream. Morpheus calls him, reveals that Neo is the One, and arranges for them to meet.

 

Brought to Morpheus (22:36)

Trinity and the rest of the Nebuchadnezzar’s crew meet Neo under a bridge and bring him to Morpheus. On the way, they extract the bug the Agents planted

  • This scene has a second, near-refusal of the call. Neo almost gets out of the car when Switch demands he take off his shirt, but Trinity convinces him to stay.

 

He knows more than you can imagine (25:04)

The crew arrives at the building where Morpheus is waiting. Trinity gives Neo advice before the meeting.

  • Throughout the film thus far, the Wachowskis have built the character of Morpheus through brief phone conversations and the comments of other characters. This scene puts the final touches on Morpheus’s pre-meeting mystique

 

Taking the red pill (25:41)

Neo is introduced to Morpheus. Morpheus starts to explain the Matrix and offers Neo a way into the real world. Neo accepts his offer.

  • This scene is more or less pure exposition, but due to Laurence Fishburne’s preternatural charisma one barely notices. Yet again, worldbuilding through conversation saves the day.
  • This is the moment that Neo crosses the first threshold. It’s a good example of a test of conviction – Morpheus repeatedly warns Neo that his decision to take the red pill is irrevocable and offers an easy way for Neo to refuse. Despite this, Neo decides to follow his destiny as the hero.

 

“Kansas is going bye-bye.” (29:51)

Morpheus leads Neo to the next room, where the rest of the crew is preparing for his awakening. The illusion of the Matrix begins to collapse and Neo wakes up in the real world.

 

Waking up (32:26)

Neo wakes up in his pod. He forces his way out and sees the horror of the human-battery fields. A machine comes and ejects him from his pod, after which the Nebuchadnezzar picks him up.

  • In Joseph Campbell’s model for the hero’s journey, this would be the ‘Belly of the Whale’ event.

 

“Welcome . . . to the real world.” (35:02)

Neo is lifted into the Nebuchadnezzar. The crew picks him up, and Morpheus welcomes Neo to the real world.

 

“Why do my eyes hurt?” (35:22)

Morpheus and the crew rebuild Neo’s atrophied body.

  • Through snippets of conversation (are you sensing a theme?) the Wachowskis continue to flesh out the world.

 

“More important than what, is ‘when?’” (36:39)

Neo wakes up in a cabin and discovers the plugs installed across his body. Morpheus arrives and explains that they’re in the far future. He tells Neo to come with him for more answers.

 

“This is my ship, the Nebuchadnezzar.” (37:52)

Morpheus shows Neo around the ship and introduces the crew.

 

Humans are batteries (39:24)

Morpheus brings Neo into a computer program and explains the Matrix. Neo panics and blacks out.

  • Yet more exposition through conversation.

 

“I can’t go back, can I?” (44:23)

Morpheus explains the prophecy of the One, then tells Neo to prepare for his training.

 

Key Takeaways:

  • It’s ok for the hero to doubt their choice more than once. While there should probably be a primary Refusal of the Call, overcoming the main Refusal doesn’t mean all the hero’s fears are assuaged. They may continue to have doubts all the way until they cross the first threshold.  
  • All it takes to make a character mysterious is to have other characters speak highly of them while the audience has little-to-no direct contact.
  • Tests of conviction are an evergreen way to Cross the First Threshold.
  • Conversation is the Swiss army knife of worldbuilding.

 

Supernatural Aid

 

Neo meets Tank (46:36)

Tank introduces himself to Neo and explains the last human city, Zion.

  • Exposition through conv- oh, you get the point.

 

“I know Kung Fu.” (47:53)

Tank uses Neo’s brain-jack to upload martial arts knowledge.

  • Rather than traditional supernatural aid, such as a magic item, Neo is aided by the Nebuchadnezzar’s ability to upload knowledge and skills directly to his mind.

 

“Show me.” (48:46)

Morpheus brings Neo into a sparring program and the two do battle. Through their combat and brief lectures, Morpheus shows Neo how to start bending the reality of the Matrix.

  • This scene shows the audience the supernatural aid Neo received before he has to use it for real. 

 

“Tank, load the Jump program.” (53:33)

Morpheus takes Neo into the Jump program and challenges him to leap between two distant buildings. Morpheus does it himself, proving it’s possible, but when Neo tries he loses faith in himself and falls painfully to the ground.

  • This scene sets an important boundary – Neo’s supernatural aid has made him a badass, but he still has a long way to go before he can defeat the villain and finish his journey.

 

“Everybody falls the first time.” (54:51)

The rest of the crew has been watching Neo’s training with Morpheus. There’s some concern over Neo’s failure to make the jump, but they generally agree that ‘everybody falls the first time.’ When Neo jacks out of the training program he realizes he’s injured, and Morpheus explains that any injuries suffered in the Matrix are also suffered in real life. Neo asks if dying in the Matrix means dying in the real world, and Morpheus confirms.

  • It’s critical for the hero to face consequences for their failures. This scene inflicts a consequence on Neo for failing to make the jump and ensures the audience knows that failure in the Matrix can be lethal.

 

Cypher is a prick (55:36)

Trinity brings Neo food but finds him asleep. Cypher confronts her outside of Neo’s room and tries to sow doubt that Neo is the One, but Trinity decides to trust Morpheus.

 

Probably the best movie scene of the decade (56:31)

Morpheus and Neo walk down a busy street while Morpheus describes the Matrix. Neo is distracted by a woman in a red dress, who turns into an Agent when he looks away. Morpheus freezes the program, revealing that it’s all a training program, and explains that everyone who is still plugged into The Matrix can potentially become an Agent. He tells Neo that it’s impossible for any human to fight against the Agents, but that as the One, he will one day be able to defeat them.

  • I promised myself I wouldn’t mention it again, but I just have to say it: nearly all the exposition in this film is done through conversation and it never once feels forced. Until I discover a better technique, I’m going to make conversation my default mode of worldbuilding.

 

Key Takeaways:

  • It’s fine (perhaps even a best practice) to have the hero’s Supernatural Aid make them a badass. However, one should be careful not to imply they have nothing further to learn. A simple way to accomplish this is to have the character fail a major test shortly after receiving their aid.

 

Tests, Allies and Enemies

 

Sentinels hunt the Nebuchadnezzar (59:00)

In the real world, squid-like machines search for the Nebuchadnezzar. Morpheus hides the ship and Trinity explains to Neo that their only weapon against their pursuers is the EMP. The machines eventually pass them by.

  • This scene is a Chekhov’s gun for the time pressure that the heroes will face later on. Once the audience sees the sentinels hunting the ship, they know that at some point the machines will find it.

 

Neo talks with Cypher (1:01:12)

Neo meets Cypher at the watch station. Cypher quickly hides what he’s been working on and they talk about the Matrix. Cypher admits that he wishes he could go back into the Matrix. Cypher mocks the idea of the One and tells Neo that he should run if he sees an Agent.

 

Cypher meets with Smith (1:03:42)

Cypher and Agent Smith meet in the Matrix. They make a deal where Cypher will betray Morpheus so that he can be re-inserted into the Matrix.

  • This is a type of enemy for the hero to overcome in the Tests, Allies and Enemies part of a story: The Traitor. 
  • The scene evokes clear themes of trading divine grace for temporal pleasure.

 

Eating with the Crew (1:05:15)

Neo eats a meal with the crew. Morpheus interrupts and says he’s bringing Neo to see the Oracle

  • This scene juxtaposes the succulent steak Cypher was just eating in the Matrix with the slop the crew has to eat in the real world.

 

Enter the Matrix (1:07:07)

The crew jacks into the Matrix.

 

Cypher gives away their location (1:07:47)

Cypher makes a call and throws the cell phone into a trash can. This gives away their exit point and allows the machines to set a trap.

  • The Traitor makes his move. At any point before this Cypher could have given up his treachery, but at this moment he becomes irredeemable.

 

Driving through the city (1:08:11)

Our heroes drive through the city on the way to the Oracle’s apartment. On the way Neo reflects on his past life and asks Trinity if she’s spoken to the Oracle. Trinity says she has. Neo asks what the Oracle told her, but they arrive before Trinity can answer.

  • Neo examines his ordinary world from his new perspective in the world of adventure. Not every story will have the hero look back so directly, but there may be moments of reminiscence where the hero remembers where they came from.

 

“I can only show you the door . . .” (1:09:18)

Morpheus and Neo ride the elevator to the Oracle’s apartment. On the way Neo asks about the Oracle and what she told Morpheus. Morpheus says she told him that he would find the One. They arrive at the apartment, and Morpheus tells Neo that he must be the one to open the door.

  • Neo faces another test of resolve. It turns out to be anticlimactic, but he still must choose to move forward. 

 

“There is no spoon” (1:10:40)

The door opens from the inside the moment Neo turns the doorknob. An assistant to the Oracle welcomes Neo and Morpheus and brings them into a surprisingly ordinary apartment. She tells Neo to wait with a group of children who may one day be released from the Matrix.

 

Neo meets the Oracle (1:12:43)

Neo is brought into the Oracle’s kitchen. After some conversation about destiny she tells him that he’s not the One, but Morpheus believes he is so strongly that he will sacrifice himself to save Neo. The Oracle says that Neo will have to choose between his life and Morpheus’s.

  • The Oracle is the first ally Neo encounters who is not a part of the Nebuchadnezzar’s crew. Her prophesy, while misleading, is what ultimately leads him to victory.

 

Leaving the Oracle (1:17:24)

Neo meets Morpheus at the entrance to the Oracle’s apartment. Morpheus tells him not to share the Oracle’s prophesy.

  • The Wachowskis are forced into a bit of damage control here. If Neo had just told Morpheus what the Oracle prophesied then all the later deaths and disasters could have been avoided, yet Morpheus suddenly insists that Neo keep it to himself. It wouldn’t necessarily be a problem, except that Morpheus has already shared his own prophesy and Trinity seemed willing to before they were interrupted. So note to self: when telling a story where the hero must keep a prophesy secret, make sure there’s a good reason for them to do so.

 

The trap is sprung (1:17:49)

Morpheus, Trinity, Neo and Cypher arrive back at the exit point. Cypher seems pleased about something as they get out of the car. Neo experiences deja-vu as they climb the stairs. The crew is alarmed and Trinity explains that deja-vu happens when the machines change something in the Matrix. The crew discovers that all the windows in the building have been replaced by brick. Mouse is killed by SWAT. Morpheus calls Tank and with his help finds them a hiding place inside the walls.

Here’s another challenge for the hero to face: Hiding. When attacked by an overwhelming force, the hero may have no choice but to hole up and hope the danger passes them by.

 

 

“They’re in the walls!” (1:21:25)

Cypher sneezes and reveals their hiding place. An Agent grabs Neo through the wall and Morpheus leaps out to protect him. He orders them all to run while he holds off the Agent. Trinity drags Neo away and they escape into the sewers.

 

Morpheus fights Smith (1:22:44)

Morpheus battles Smith, but despite all his skill is overwhelmed and captured.

  • When mentors face villains, they always lose. Always. But their defeat pushes the hero forward in their journey, so their sacrifice is ultimately worth it. This is another crisis for the hero to face during the Test, Allies and Enemies part of a story: The Mentor Fights The Villain.

 

Cypher calls for an exit (1:25:05)

Cypher calls Tank and asks for an exit point. Tank is suspicious as to why Cypher is not with the others, but gives him the location.

 

Trinity calls for an exit (1:25:31)

Trinity calls Tank. Neo asks if Morpheus is still alive and Tank confirms he is. Tank gives them the same exit point he just gave Cypher.

 

Cypher’s betrayal (1:25:46)

Cypher arrives at the exit point first and returns to the real world. He gets a weapon, incapacitates Tank, and kills Dozer.

 

At the mercy of a madman (1:26:39)

Neo tries to exit the Matrix but the line goes dead. Trinity calls the ship and Cypher answers. Cypher rants about his grievances, real and imagined. He starts pulling the plug on the other crew members, killing them one by one. He’s about to kill Neo when Tank intervenes and kills him.

  • Not all forms of torture involve physical pain inflicted on the hero. While it takes an indirect form (watching his friends be killed one by one), this scene is another challenge for the hero to face: Tortured!

 

Leaving the Matrix (1:30:52)

Tank re-establishes their exit and Trinity returns to the real world. (We don’t see Neo leave, but it’s implied.)

 

Morpheus’s interrogation begins (1:31:27)

Morpheus is handcuffed to a chair while Smith monologues about a previous form of the Matrix and human psychology. Another Agent injects Morpheus with a truth drug.

  • Here we find the last of the challenges in the Tests, Allies and Enemies part of The Matrix: A Captured Friend. Someone the hero cares about has been taken by the villain, and the hero must go and rescue them.

 

A terrible choice (1:33:31)

Aboard the Nebuchadnezzar, Tank explains how the truth drug works. He tells Neo that Morpheus has the access codes to Zion’s mainframe computer, and if an Agent got the codes they could destroy all of humanity. Tank says that they have no choice but to unplug Morpheus before that happens.

 

The Agents converse (1:34:27)

The Agents realize that Cypher is dead. They don’t know if he managed to kill the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar before he died, but because they can’t change the situation either way they decide to continue with their plan.

 

Key Takeaways:

  • If it’s worth doing once, it’s worth doing a lot. Neo has to repeatedly prove his determination to move forward on the hero’s journey, and the audience loves him for it
  • Related to the above, Neo is constantly tested through choices. Does he meet with Morpheus? Does he take the red pill? Does he sacrifice Morpheus to protect himself? This suggests that a powerful technique for showing a hero’s virtue is to force them to make a series of difficult decisions
  • I don’t buy all of Campbell’s archetypal symbolism, but it’s hard to ignore the blatant themes evoked when Cypher trades his freedom for worldly pleasure.
  • We can add three types of challenges to our toolbox: Hiding, Tortured!, and A Captured Friend. We also have an ally, The Oracle, and an enemy, The Traitor.

 

Approach to the Inmost Cave

 

Neo chooses (1:34:36)

Tank is reluctantly preparing to unplug Morpheus when Neo interrupts him. He tells Tank and Trinity about the Oracle’s prophecy and that he’s not the One. Trinity says that can’t be true, but when Neo questions her she won’t say why. Neo and Trinity jack back into the Matrix to save Morpheus.

  • Neo’s Approach to the Inmost Cave begins with, you guessed it, a choice.

 

Humans are a virus (1:37:25)

Agent Smith taunts Morpheus with his perception of humanity as a virus.

  • For some reason villains are always more vivid and memorable that the often bland heroes whom they serve as foils. Smith is no exception.

 

“We need guns. Lots of guns.” (1:38:43)

Inside the loading program, Neo asks for lots of guns and Tank delivers. Trinity tells Neo that no one has ever attempted a direct attack against the machines, and Neo says that’s why it’s going to work.

 

Smith interrogates Morpheus (1:39:12)

Smith sends the other two Agents away so that he can question Morpheus alone. He reveals that he hates being in the Matrix and says that he’s going to kill Morpheus if Morpheus doesn’t give him the codes.

  • This scene reveals that Smith, far from the cold inhumanity that characterizes the other Agents, is actually somewhat unhinged. This helps put more time pressure on the heroes – even if Morpheus doesn’t break under the interrogation, Smith might snap and kill him.

 

Key Takeaways:

  • The Approach to the Inmost Cave preps the audience for the upcoming Ordeal. Every scene in this part of The Matrix puts time pressure on the heroes and builds anticipation for what comes next
  • The Approach to the Inmost Cave is a good place for the Big Bad to put on a show of villainy before their forthcoming downfall.

 

The Ordeal

 

The lobby shootout (1:41:04)

Neo and Trinity get in an enormous gunfight with the police and SWAT forces protecting the building that holds Morpheus.

  • If you’ve somehow never seen this scene before- stop reading, open YouTube, and go watch it.

 

“I think they’re trying to save him.” (1:44:20)

The other two Agents interrupt Smith’s interrogation. Trinity and Neo set up a bomb in the elevator. The Agents tell Smith that the crew is trying to save Morpheus. Trinity and Neo cut the elevator cable and ride it to the top of the building while their bomb falls back down to the first floor. The bomb goes off, setting off the sprinkler system, and Smith tells the other Agents to find and destroy the attackers.

 

Neo dodges bullets (1:45:54)

Trinity and Neo neutralize the SWAT team on the roof. One of the SWAT team is possessed by an Agent, who confronts Neo. Neo tries to shoot him, but the Agent dodges the bullets. The Agent shoots back and Neo manages to evade all of the bullets except for one, which grazes him and breaks his concentration. The Agent stands over Neo and is about to shoot him when Trinity shoots the Agent from point-blank range. She asks Neo how he was able to dodge bullets like the Agents and he gives a non-answer. Trinity downloads a pilot program from Tank and she and Neo steal the SWAT team’s helicopter.

  • This is an important middle step in Neo’s development. The upload training is his first step towards defeating the villain, but it’s not sufficient on its own. It would be jarring for him to move directly from his training to defeating Smith, so the scene gives him another challenge to overcome on his way towards beating the Big Bad.

 

Saving Morpheus (1:47:45)

Trinity and Neo fly the helicopter to the floor where Morpheus is being kept and use a minigun to kill the three Agents guarding him. Morpheus breaks out of his handcuffs and runs for the helicopter, but the three Agents have taken new bodies and shoot him in the knee just before the jump. Neo leaps out (with a cord tying him to the helicopter) and catches Morpheus. Smith shoots the helicopter and it begins to crash.

  • I’m still not certain why the Ordeal always comes before the Showdown with the Villain, but for some reason it does. There’s no real reason that Neo has to battle Smith in the subway. The subway scene is fun, sure, and their fight is more flashy as a one-on-one duel, but it would have made just as much sense for Neo to battle the Agents on his way to save Morpheus. Yet this doesn’t happen. The Ordeal is kept separate and distinct from the Showdown with the Villain, and until I have a better grasp on why I’m just going to make sure to follow that rule.

 

Saving Trinity (1:50:46)

Neo drops Morpheus on a rooftop and lands a short distance away. He realizes that Trinity is still inside the crashing helicopter and prepares to try to catch the entire vehicle using the cord still tied around his waist. Trinity cuts the cord free and uses it to swing away from the helicopter just before it crashes. Tank says that Neo is the One, and Neo pulls Trinity up to safety.

 

Key Takeaways:

  • The hero’s development should have at least three steps. First they’re trained, then they must use their training, and finally they defeat the villain.
  • The Ordeal should push the hero to his limits (and even a bit beyond them), but it does not involve the hero directly confronting the villain
  • Movement is good for action. This battle does not get bogged down in one place; first there’s the lobby, then the elevator, then rooftop, then minigunning from the helicopter, and finally the helicopter crash. To keep the action fresh make sure that the battle moves over time.

 

The Reward

Knowing the path, and walking the path (1:51:38)

At last, Morpheus, Neo and Trinity are all safe. Neo and Trinity exchange a long, passionate look after he pulls her onto the roof. Morpheus asks Trinity if she believes that Neo is the One, and Neo asks Morpheus about the Oracle’s false prophecy. Morpheus explains that the Oracle only told him what he needed to hear.

 

Key Takeaways

  • Trinity is far from a damsel in distress. Still, I can’t help but notice that before the end of his hero’s journey, Neo has to save his one true love.
  • If the story involves a prophesy, it can be more interesting when the prophesy is false, or even a lie.

 

Showdown with the Villain

 

Escaping after the raid (1:52:16)

Morpheus calls Tank and gets an exit location.

 

Ordering the Sentinels to attack (1:52:26)

The three Agents find the discarded remains of our heroes’ gear. One says that the Sentinels have located the Nebuchadnezzar and orders them to attack the ship. Agent Smith realizes that the heroes must still be in the Matrix.

 

In the subway (1:52:56)

Our heroes arrive at the exit location – a payphone in the subway. Morpheus exits, but a homeless man sees him disappear and Agent Smith is alerted. Trinity is about to tell Neo what the Oracle prophesied for her when a train drives through the station and drowns out her words. She decides to exit the Matrix rather than finish and gets out just before Agent Smith shoots her. His bullet destroys the phone, trapping Neo in the Matrix.

 

“He’s beginning to believe.” (1:54:22)

Neo could flee, but decides to stay and fight. Neo and Smith have a ferocious battle. Smith gradually starts to win and decides to kill Neo by holding him in front of an oncoming train. Neo manages to get free and leaps out of the way. Smith is hit by the train.

  • Neo faces two more tests of resolve: first when he decides to stay and fight, and second when he stands up and shakes off the dust after being downed by Smith.
  • Smith is killed by his own arrogance, not Neo’s battle prowess.
  • Smith has always called Neo by the name he was born with, Mr. Anderson. In this scene Neo repudiates that name and embraces his identity as the hero.

 

Key Takeaways:

  • The battle between Neo and Agent Smith is a masterclass on how to do a Showdown with the Villain. We should make special note of each of these elements:
    1. Neo stays and fights when he had the option to run away
    2. Neo shows grit and determination despite battling a superior opponent
    3. Smith is certain he’s invincible, and Neo uses his arrogance to defeat him
    4. Through this battle Neo gives up his old self and embraces his identity as a hero

 

The Road Back

 

Running from the Agents (1:58:39)

Neo’s victory is short lived – Agent Smith takes a new body aboard the train and stops it. Neo has to run.

  • In Joseph Campbell’s model, this marks the start of the Magic Flight

 

The Sentinels approach (1:58:48)

The Sentinels find the Nebuchadnezzar, leaving Neo only a few minutes to get out of the Matrix before they destroy the ship. Morpheus charges the EMP, but can’t use it while Neo is still jacked in.

  • Image result for the tension is terrible, i hope it'll last

 

“Mr. Wizard, get me the hell out of here!” (1:59:23)

Neo steals a phone and calls Tank, who gives him an exit location. With Tank guiding him Neo flees through streets and buildings, trying to escape the pursuing Agents.

 

The Sentinels arrive (2:00:58)

The Sentinels reach the Nebuchadnezzar and begin cutting through the hull. Morpheus prepares to set off the EMP and reassures Trinity that Neo is going to make it.

 

Back where it all started (2:01:34)

The exit is in the same building where the Agents found Trinity at the start of the movie. Smith realizes this and splits off from the other two Agents. Tank gives Neo the room number for the exit and Neo runs for it.

 

The Sentinels breach the hull (2:02:11)

The Sentinels finish cutting their way into the Nebuchadnezzar and begin wreaking havoc inside.

 

Key Takeaways:

  • This is an almost perfect example of The Magic Flight in Joseph Campbell’s model for a hero’s journey. Our hero Neo has to run like hell from an enraged god and escape back to his (new) ordinary world.
  • This escape scene is all about the time pressure. If we want to have a similarly dramatic Road Back in our own stories, we need to make sure that the hero is racing against the clock.

 

The Resurrection

 

Neo’s death (2:02:28)

Neo reaches the exit, but Smith got there first. Smith shoots him repeatedly and Neo’s heart stops. Trinity and Morpheus look on in horror. The other two Agents arrive and confirm that Neo is dead.

 

The Power of Love and . . . well, just Love (2:03:17)

The Sentinels continue to destroy the Nebuchadnezzar. Trinity tells Neo’s lifeless body that the Oracle told her she would fall in love, and that the man she loved would be the One. She says that Neo can’t be dead, because she loves him. She kisses him and his heart starts beating. When she sees this, she orders him to get up.

 

When you’re ready, you won’t have to (2:04:55)

Back in the Matrix, Neo gets to his feet. The Agents see this and all try to shoot him at once, but with a wave of his hand he freezes the bullets in the air. Neo now sees the Matrix in its raw code. Smith attacks Neo and Neo defeats him effortlessly. He leaps inside of Smith’s body and destroys him from the inside out. The other two Agents flee.

 

In the nick of time (2:06:55)

Back in the real world, the Sentinels have reached the crew. Trinity shouts for Neo and he rushes to the exit phone. A Sentinel is just about to kill Neo when Morpheus triggers the EMP. The machines drop lifelessly the ground. Neo wakes up and kisses Trinity.

 

Key Takeaways:

  • Despite all the (often justified) criticisms of his work, Joseph Campbell was onto something when he said that heroes grow through death and rebirth. The Matrix is a particularly telling example because Neo’s resurrection appears to be totally incongruent with the rest of the film, if you view the film as dystopian cyberpunk. A kiss brings the hero back from the dead? Come on, what fantasy garbage is this? And yet there’s scarcely a peep of complaint from the audience, because in the context of the hero’s journey, Neo’s miraculous rebirth is completely appropriate.

 

Return with the Elixir

 

System Failure (2:07:53)

Neo calls the machines. Like in the beginning of the film the machines try to trace the call, but are met with a sudden system failure. Neo says that he’s going to set humanity free from the machine’s control.

 

Key Takeaways:

  • A minimalist Return with the Elixir seems to be a hallmark of modern stories. Neo doesn’t get a grand feast, or an awards ceremony where everyone gets a medal but the Wookie. We’re left with nothing but hope for a better world, and yet somehow that’s still enough.

Introduction to Story Analyses

Tim Ferris has a saying I quite like: “What would this look like if it were easy?”

It’s Occam’s Razor for projects. When we’re working on something large and complicated it’s easy to become overwhelmed and unsure of what to do next. This can cause a lethal feedback loop that sinks a great many projects before they ever get off the ground. But Tim’s saying offers a lifeline. Any time a task seems too daunting to possibly complete, take a step back and ask, “What would this look like if it were easy?”

So, what would a telling story look like if it were easy? As I thought about this question, I eventually realized it has a simple answer: the story would have boundaries.

Great stories tend to stick with us, to provoke thoughts and inspire our imagination until they appear much grander and more complex than they really are. I certainly don’t want to minimize the impact or value of great stories, but I suspect that once we start with some real analysis, we’re going to find that even the greatest tales are not as sophisticated as they at first seem.  If you’re hoping to preserve the mystique of storytelling now’s the time to stop reading, because the next several posts are entirely devoted to deconstruction. We’re going to take these stories apart, label the pieces, and learn how to put them together again.

So let’s start by establishing some boundaries. How many scenes does an average story have? Maybe . . . a thousand? No way! I can hear you cry, That’s obviously too many. I agree, and just like that we’ve established a boundary; no matter how intimidating our story may seem, it’s got to have less than a thousand scenes.

Now it’s time for a bit of investigation. How many scenes does a story really have? This turns out to be a simple question with a definite answer, if we just take the time to look. After establishing the scenes, I’m going to see how many major characters and key events we’re dealing with. I’ll bet you it’s fewer than we think. Once we have these key parts identified, we can analyze how they’re put together, what roles they play, and finally start drawing some conclusions about the best way to tell our own stories.

For these analyses, I define a scene as: “A part of a story where characters perform an action in a location.” Any one of these elements – the characters, the action, and the location – can change without starting a new scene. In some cases two can change without breaking the scene, but there has to be a strong thematic connection to hold the scene together. If all three have changed, we’re definitely in a new scene.

What about characters? A major character is any character who, at some point in the story, performs an action that drives the plot forward. In some stories this may relegate beloved figures to minor character status, but if the character doesn’t move the story towards its conclusion, we have to accept that they’re just not critical to the narrative.

Lastly, what constitutes an ‘event?’ Those of you who have been following my posts on the hero’s journey will get this right away. An event is a part of a story like the Call to Adventure or Approach to the Inmost Cave – a collection of scenes bound together by a common theme that advances the plot towards its finale.

The analyses go through a story scene by scene. I’ll name the scene, give a short description, and add any comments which are specific to that part of the story. At the end of each event I’ll wrap up with a Key Takeaways section that summarizes the lessons we can incorporate into our writing.

Since I’m studying the hero’s journey, I’m going to start by analyzing four stories: The Matrix, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Star Wars: A New Hope, and The Hobbit. You can find my first analysis, examining The Matrix, here. 

The Starting Line

Ready or not, the day has come – there are only 200 days left to achieve my goal of completing a 100,000 word novel by the February 25th, 2019.

Today is important because it marks an unofficial start date. If I’m to reach my goal, I need to start writing 500 words a day, every day, until I reach the finish line. Writing more will soften this deadline somewhat, but the race has definitely started, and it seems as good a time as any to review my progress thus far.

First, the good. I’ve finished The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and while reading Campbell was often an exasperating experience,  I have a grasp on the hero’s journey that was sorely lacking in my projects of years gone by. My grip on the subject grew firmer still by contrasting Campbell’s work with Christopher Vogler’s. The theoretical parts of my project, at least, seem under control.

I’ve analyzed the first Star Wars film, as well as Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and much of The Hobbit. I learned a great deal from these masterworks, and the pages of notes I took on each wait restlessly for the day they’ll be turned into blog posts.

Outside of the blog, I’ve built a durable storyboard of the novel I’ll be writing. There are still a few unresolved questions and plot points to hammer out, but I have more than enough to start.

Now for the bad. As mentioned, while I have reviewed several of the great Hero’s Journey stories, I have not yet taken the time to smelt my raw material into content for the blog. This is not just a problem as a content creator  – the process of writing an essay helps solidify knowledge and expose gaps in understanding, so I want to complete these analyses before getting too far into my project.

An even greater problem is the shamefully small amount of time I’ve spent applying the practice techniques detailed at the start of the blog. This may turn out to be a boon, since in the meantime I’ve discovered several writers of literary fiction whose mastery of English is vastly superior to some of the authors I considered studying, but I’m still perilously behind where I wanted to be. I can only hope that any improvements in writing technique achieved during the final months of the project can be applied through edits.

Finally, my recent trip to Nigeria was both enriching and enlightening, but I didn’t get any work done. I hope to at least slightly make up for this lapse by releasing the Hero’s Journey toolbox as soon as possible. It’s been coming together quickly since my return, so with any luck it will be ready in the next couple weeks.

And that brings us to the heart of my next challenge. I’ve written three (unpublishable) novels of 100,000 words or more at the slow-but-steady rate of 500 words a day, but never while trying to simultaneously maintain a blog. “Does that mean,” you may ask, “that your already languid rate of posting will decrease even further?” Not if I have anything to say about it. The challenge of doing it is the point of doing it, and so, to appropriate a line, “Damn the distractions, full speed ahead!”

The Staring Line: Here we go!

Now that I’ve laid out the theory of deliberate practice, it’s time to make some concrete plans. To get started, I need to decide two things:

  1. What are the specific goals I’m aiming for?
  2. Who are the expert performers that I’m going to study?

In general, I enjoy science fiction, fantasy, and horror in that order. Because of this I’m going to focus on authors from those genres, but genre isn’t a specific enough goal for deliberate practice. Altered Carbon and The Martian are two of my favorite recent books and both are science fiction, but they have about as much in common as airplanes and helicopters.

So instead of focusing on genre, I’m going to work on a type of story. Given that this is my first attempt to learn a story type, I figure I’ll start with something ubiquitous, that everyone knows and almost everyone uses. With that in mind, the type of story I’ve decided to work on first is the original, the classic, the story-that-began-all-stories, the Hero’s Journey.

With that decision, a number of questions are immediately answered. Which authors have written the best hero’s journeys? Two names leap to mind: J.K. Rowling and J.R.R. Tolkien. If I expand the question to film, George Lucas and the Wachowski brothers join the team. There’s also an academic and psychological breakdown of the story type in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. I’ll use these five resources as my starting point and expand from there.

But this plan still isn’t solid enough. Remember: “Deliberate practice focuses on specific goals and develops lesson plans to reach them bit by bit.” So how about this: first, I’m going to focus on mastering the structure of the story. I’ll analyze my four primary sources and Joseph Campbell’s work, then use what I learned to lay out the general path of the hero’s journey.

Then, after I’ve gotten a good handle on the key story events, I’ll pick the best example of each event from my pool of primary sources. Once I’ve chosen my exemplars I’ll use Benjamin Franklin’s hints exercise to examine how the author handled the scene and simultaneously study their writing style. I’ll repeat as needed with examples from the each author’s work until I feel confident enough to try applying what I’ve learned in an original novel.

And that’s the endgame. Within the next 12 months, I’ll write an original hero’s journey story of at least 100,000 words.

The average novel has between 80,000 and 140,000 words, so I think 100,000 is an appropriate target. In the past my goal was to write 500 words a day, a number I deliberately kept low to ensure I wouldn’t get overwhelmed. I found it’s much easier to aim for a low target and routinely surpass it than to set a high goal I couldn’t consistently reach.

500 words a day gets me to 100,000 words in a bit more than seven months. If I manage 1,000 words a day I’ll finish in slightly more than three months. That means I’ll have at least five and perhaps up to six or seven months for studying, after which I need to start hitting word count goals. I’ll also need to carve out time for writing posts on the Practice Write blog while maintaining a job and hopefully having some occasional free time for a life. I’ve found that editing can stretch on and on almost without end (especially if I deliberately take some time to cool off from a story) so I’m not going to include it in my 12 month goal.  

It’s a brisk pace, but it seems doable. So that’s the plan: by the 25th of February, 2019, I’ll have analyzed and studied at least (in reality, definitely more than) 4 hero’s journey stories, built a mental representation of how the story works, and written an original hero’s journey novel of at least 100,000 words.

Gauntlet thrown. Let’s get to it.

Discipline: The Path to Freedom

We’ve saved the best – or at least the most important – for last. Like 95% of aspiring authors the #1 reason I’ve failed to get published is lack of discipline, and for any of the practice techniques we’ve talked about to work we need to start by fixing that problem.

You may have heard of the ‘Ten Thousand Hour,’ rule. Ironically, it’s based on a misinterpretation of some of the research Anders Ericsson performed while discovering deliberate practice. The rule supposedly says that to become an expert in any field, you need to invest at least ten thousand hours of practice.

This turns out to not be entirely accurate (the truth is both more and less daunting, check out page 109 of Peak for more details), but it does help put the challenge in perspective. If you invested an hour of practice a day, every day, you’d complete your ten thousand hours in a bit more than 27 years.

Oof.

The ten thousand hour rule has significant flaws, so don’t get discouraged. But it’s clear that the path to becoming a great writer isn’t one we’re finishing in a few months, or even a few years. So how do we build the willpower to keep working day after day after day until we reach our goal?

For help, I’m turning to two men: retired Navy SEAL Jocko Willink, and our good friend Dr. Anders Ericsson.

 

Jocko Willink:

Jocko Willink is a former Navy SEAL officer turned writer, podcaster, and leadership trainer. He’s published an entire book in discipline – titled Discipline Equals Freedom: Field Manual – and nearly every page has something useful to say about maintaining willpower. I’m sure I’ll come back to his work in future posts, but for now I’m going to focus on the point that resonated with me the most:

Discipline leads to more discipline.

The thought is this: the more you practice discipline, even in little things, the better prepared you are to maintain it when it counts.

Borrowing one of Jocko’s examples: imagine that you woke up early in the morning and went right to the gym. Then you ate a healthy breakfast, packed a good lunch, and went to work. A little before lunchtime one of your co-workers brings around a box of donuts for the team.

Do you take the donut?

Jocko argues, and I agree, that you probably won’t. Just like how an object in motion tends to remain in motion, a person practicing discipline in all areas is much more likely to maintain it when it’s challenged. For us, that means sitting down to write even when we don’t feel like it.

Now imagine the inverse of Jocko’s scenario. Instead of getting up early, you woke up late. You didn’t get any exercise and stopped by Starbucks for breakfast. When the donuts come around, isn’t it easy to feel like just having just one won’t do much harm?

Then later that evening, if you’re tired and don’t really feel up to writing, you might think that skipping your practice time isn’t that big of a deal. After all, you can always catch up tomorrow. Right?

NO. WRONG ANSWER.

Discipline is a choice. We choose to eat the donut or we don’t, and we choose to sit down and write or we don’t. The first step is choosing that writing is important to us and we’re going to make it happen. Every day. Whether we feel like it or not. Even if we’re just going through the motions, we choose to write.

After that we take on other factors that affect our decision, the things that make it easier or harder to make the right choice. I want to make sure I’m making the right decisions about my practice, so instead of just trying to get disciplined about writing, I’m bringing discipline to my entire day. That way when I’m tempted to skip a practice session or stop a bit early, the discipline and good habits I’ve been forging will be there to keep me on the right path.

And one last point: there will absolutely be times that I fail. If I miss a practice session I won’t berate myself forever, but I’ll recognize that, for that day, I let my dream down. If I want to become a successful writer, every day I don’t practice is a day that I screwed up.

The details of what I’m planning are at the end of this post, but before I lay them out let’s hear from Dr. Ericsson.

 

Dr. Anders Ericsson:

As a part of his research, Dr. Ericsson asked how students maintain the motivation to keep practicing, often for several hours every day, for the decades it takes to master a complicated skill. He discusses his findings on page 165 of Peak, but these were my key takeaways.

First, no one loves practicing. It’s easy to think that a student who sits down and practices the violin for three hours a day must simply love playing the violin, but Dr. Ericsson found that even students who devote large amounts of time to their craft would usually much rather be off with friends or enjoying some other form of entertainment. The successful performers are universally the ones who found ways to keep practicing even when they didn’t enjoy it.

Second, there is no evidence that willpower is an innate characteristic. No one is born with a genetic gift for willpower or discipline, and everyone who develops these traits has to work for it. Barring some major medical condition, there’s no reason that any of us cannot learn to practice.

Third, and in line with Jocko, the people who maintained their practice regimen long term had to redesign their lives and build new habits to support their practice goals. This goes way beyond just scheduling a time to practice. The best students built their day around their practice and had a good sense of the time they spent on different tasks, even (or perhaps especially) their leisure time. This let them make sure they always had the time needed for practice.

Fourth, the students minimized the factors that get in the way of practicing. Smartphone: off. Imgur: closed. Workspace: neat, organized and ready to go.  This applies in a broader context as well. For example, being tired makes it much harder to practice, so simply getting enough sleep was an important first step.

Fifth and finally, the students maximized the factors that encourage practice. This is a bit more vague because it varies from person to person, but Dr. Ericsson mentions how many students surrounded themselves with like-minded and motivated people, and eventually took great pride in their skill as their performance improved. Especially early on, reminders of why they were practicing were critical to keep them moving forward.

 

The Plan:

Now that we’ve collected all that advice, what’s the plan? This list will certainly change over time, but to start my goals are:

  1. Get out of bed early. First alarm is set for 5:45 AM, with the goal of out of bed by 6:00. 6:30 at the absolute latest. This will require that I get to bed at a reasonable hour. I know that for a lot of people 5:45 AM isn’t a terribly impressive wake-up time, but it’s much earlier than I used to get up and it gives me the time I need for what I have planned in the morning.
  2. Exercise. At least a half-hour before work, and probably more as I get back into shape. I’ll also be going to jiujutsu class at least once a week. Health makes it easier to focus, the morning exercise will wake me up, and it’s a great area to build up discipline.
  3. Good decisions, by which I mean eating better, de-cluttering my desk, keeping my apartment clean, and so on. This may seem petty, or at least unrelated creative writing, but I firmly believe that these little disciplines are critical for making sure I maintain my practice goals. Speaking of which . . .
  4. Practice, for at least an hour a day. I work from 9 AM to 5:30 PM and the cafeteria is nice and quiet, so my goal is to arrive at work at least an hour early and get in my practice time. On weekends or if the cafe isn’t available, I’ll be at my desk at home. An hour is the bare minimum, so if I have any free time (such as when eating lunch) I’ll be looking to pump that rookie number up.
  5. The practice log. Part motivation and part timekeeper, I’ll keep a public log of the times I exercise, practice, write blog posts. and so on. This will make it easy to tell if I’m slipping and prod me with a bit of embarrassment if I start slacking off.

If I can meet these goals I should be well on my way towards creating the discipline I need to keep practicing.

***

And with that, we’ve covered the basics of deliberate practice and how I’ll apply it to my writing. The next post will lay out my starting point, and after that we’re off to the races. Let’s get to it. 

Getting Feedback: Difficult, Awkward, and the Only Way We’re Going to Succeed

Getting feedback is by far my least favorite part of writing. It’s not because criticism hurts; I accepted that fact many years ago and have a few tricks for mitigating it – more on that in a future post. No, it’s my least favorite because we must have feedback to improve, but good feedback is hard to come by.

Here’s what I mean. At its core, writing is using written language to convey an idea from one person’s mind to another. If the writing successfully conveys the idea and does it in a way that’s simple and intuitive for the reader, it’s good writing. If the writing fails to convey the idea, or does it so awkwardly the idea is damaged, it’s bad writing. It doesn’t matter if the idea is an emotion, an experience, a story or simply data – the quality of the writing is measured by how well it passes that idea to the reader.

The problem is that this leaves us with no objective metrics for measuring success (besides a few basic rules like grammar and spelling.) It makes writing much trickier than, say, competitive games, which have a defined winner and loser. The loser might not know exactly why they lost, but the moment a game ends they know that whatever they were doing didn’t work. It’s the same for any skill that’s easily measured; a runner can track their time, and a bodybuilder knows they’re getting better because they can lift heavier weights. But conveying an idea is inherently subjective, so the only sure way to know if a piece of writing succeeded is by giving it to readers and asking them.

So that’s what authors do. From grade students working on their first short story to New York Times bestsellers, every author I know of relies heavily on beta readers and editors, often with a writer’s circle thrown in for good measure. The author edits the work as much as they can on their own, then gives it to others for critique.

This approach clearly can work – pretty much all successful authors developed their skills this way – but I have two major concerns about relying solely on other people for feedback.

My first concern is about the quality of the feedback. This problem is this: can our readers give us the detailed and prescriptive criticism we need to improve? After fifteen years of soliciting critiques from anyone I could convince to read my work, I’ll argue that most readers can’t.

I’m certainly not saying their feedback is worthless, or that we should be ungrateful of the time and energy they spent reviewing our writing. But it’s like a person trying to give advice about a chess game when they only know the basic rules. They can tell us if we won or lost and maybe point to a few obviously bad plays, but they simply don’t have the expertise to explain our mistakes and tell us what we need to change to get better. Feedback from readers is still invaluable and I’m in no way suggesting we should forgo it, but unless we have the tremendous good fortune of having our work critiqued by someone who’s really studied writing and story, I think it’s a mistake to believe their advice alone can guide us to success.

My second concern is the social aspect. As I mentioned a moment ago, until our writing is good enough that people are genuinely eager to look at it (meaning we’re most of the way to success already), we have to recognize that anyone who reads and gives us feedback is doing us a tremendous favor. I, for one, would like to abuse their generosity as little as possible, and only ask them to read a project when it’s as refined as possible. This probably seems obvious and I imagine most everyone will agree, but I mention it because I believe we can do far, far more to refine our writing on our own than most aspiring authors realize (including myself in years gone by).

Before I start discussing my proposed solutions I want to make one final point, and it’s that feedback is non-optional. No matter how difficult it is there’s no cheat, hack, or way of avoiding it: to improve a skill, the practitioner must have some way to track how they’re doing. There’s a quote I like: “Practice doesn’t make perfect. Practice makes permanent.” The warning is clear – without criticism the most likely outcomes of practice are either no progress, or ingraining bad habits so that we actually get worse.

So, we must have feedback. But there aren’t easy metrics for measuring good writing, and we’re not going to rely entirely on feedback from others. Is there another method to know if we’re improving?

Fortunately there is. Two ways in fact, and they’re both things we all have access to. The first is the work of expert writers, and the second is mental representations.

 

The Genius of Benjamin Franklin

In the post on practice I explained the techniques that Benjamin Franklin used to improve his writing. Since he didn’t give them names, I’m calling them the hints exercise and the structure exercise.

For anyone who skipped that post (don’t skip that post) the exercises involve finding an excellent piece of writing, then making short notes about what happens in it. After a few days we use those notes to rewrite the piece as best we can, or scramble the notes and try to reconstruct the order.

The genius of these techniques is that they let us use an expert’s writing as a form of feedback. We take a piece of writing that we know is successful, and with repeated cycles of emulation and correction try to mimic that success. Every time we finish we get instant feedback on how we did just by comparing our work to the original. There’s also no doubt about whether the feedback is reliable; the piece we’ve chosen has already proven it’s successful, so we just need to figure out how to make our work as good as it is.

As we do this practice over and over, working on different pieces from different authors, we’re building mental representations of how to express ideas in writing. As I explained in the post of mental representations, saying someone is good at a skill and saying they have high quality mental representations of that skill mean the exact same thing. But mental representations have another benefit. When your mental representations are good enough, they give you a chance to catch your own mistakes. That brings us to the other way I’m going to work on solo feedback:

 

Editing as a Skill

In the post on mental representations, I mentioned how strong representations help expert performers critique their own work. As Anders Ericsson explains it on page 77 of Peak:

Several researchers have examined what differentiates the best musicians from lesser ones, and one of the major differences lies in the quality of the mental representations the best ones create. When practicing a new piece, beginning and intermediate musicians generally lack a good, clear idea of how the music should sound, while advanced musicians have a very detailed mental representation of the music they use to guide their practice and, ultimately, their performance of a piece. In particular, they use their mental representations to provide their own feedback so that they know how close they are to getting the piece right and what they need to do differently to improve.

Every author spends a good amount of time editing their own work, but before I encountered the idea of mental representations I never thought of it as a skill I could improve. When I edited I just read over what I wrote and changed things that didn’t sound right. Now I understand what I was doing; I had a mental representation of what the writing should sound like, and I was comparing my work to that representation.

But that representation wasn’t very good. It was mostly just a haphazard amalgamation of books I enjoyed, habitual phrasing, and bits of feedback I’d gotten from teachers and family. It was too poorly constructed to consistently find and correct mistakes. However, there’s no reason it has to stay that way. As I build more complete and higher quality mental representations, I’ll not only learn to do better work on the first attempt, but also improve my skill at catching my own mistakes.

But there’s a big problem with self-editing, and it’s that our brains will try to trick us.  When we review our work we already know what we meant to say, so our minds will often gloss over even the most severe errors. To combat this, we need to detach from what we wrote and come back to it as much like a new reader as possible. Obviously we can never fully detach, but here are some techniques that I’m going to try:

  1. Waiting before editing. This is an obvious strategy and one most authors already apply, so I’m mostly just mentioning it because it’s a classic. By waiting a few days, weeks or even months before editing, we can forget enough details that when we re-read we’re looking at the words which are actually on the screen, rather than the words our brains know should be there. If I could give my past self advice, one of the first things I’d explain is that it’s fine to wait a few months before editing a piece.
  2. Reading aloud. This is a time consuming process, so while I’ve heard it advised a number of times I’ve known plenty of aspiring authors (my past self included) who just couldn’t be bothered. But just like waiting before editing, forcing ourselves to say each word aloud gives us another chance to read what’s on the page rather than what’s in our head.
  3. Listening to a recording of reading aloud. This is one I haven’t heard recommended much, but given how easy it is to make a recording these days I’m going to give it a try. I listen to audiobooks constantly, so when I read a piece aloud I’ll also record it and put it on my phone. Then I can listen to the story like someone else is telling it to me (especially if I wait for a bit before listening to the recording), and try to evaluate it as though the story was not my own.

These three techniques are a good start, but I’m sure there are other ways to detach from our work. If I discover new methods I’ll come back and edit this post, so if you have any great ways of stepping back before editing a project send them my way through the contact page.

 

No, we can’t do it alone:

While the two methods above should allow for considerable improvement, there’s no escaping that we’re eventually going to need feedback from others. So far my most valuable feedback has come from my family, who are all experienced readers and have built solid mental representations of what a good story looks like. I’m going to continue to rely on their feedback in the future, and will ask any friends who may be interested in a story to take a look and tell me what they think.

But what if I need something beyond that? What if I hit a plateau that I can’t overcome on my own, and my current readers can’t tell me what to do differently?

The answer is simple, but not good: I have no idea.

I know, that’s probably not what you were hoping for. There are options, of course. To name just a few, I could join a master’s degree program in creative writing, go to a writer’s workshop, or find a writer’s circle. But I have serious concerns about the expense and efficacy of these organizations. Even a cursory google search reveals that many master’s students don’t believe their degree in creative writing was helpful. Writer’s workshops are similarly unreliable, and would require several thousand dollars and up to six weeks away from work. Unfortunately, that’s not really an option.

A writer’s circle is more practical, but has its own problems. When Dr. Ericsson discusses social organizations like chess clubs and community theaters on page 176 of Peak, he says,

One thing to be careful about, however, is to make sure that the other members of the group have similar goals for improvement. If you join a bowling team because you are trying to improve your bowling scores and the rest of your team is mainly interested in having a good time, with little concern about whether they win the league title, you’re going to be frustrated, not motivated.

By and large, this has been my experience with amateur writer’s circles. The people were kind and often interesting, but they generally spent more time talking about their ideas or how difficult writing can be than improving. If I found a professional writer’s circle I’d jump on the opportunity, but until I have something published I’ll probably need to pursue other options.

But all that’s far in the future. For now we’ve got a ton of work to do, and have defined our initial methods for measuring progress. Now we need to take the last and hardest step: build the discipline to put everything we’ve learned to use. See you in the next post. 

Practice: What to do During the Montage

All right, things are starting to come together. We’ve figured out what makes deliberate practice different from the normal author’s path. We’ve started analyzing the work of expert writers and learned how we improve skills through mental representations. We have a blank sheet of paper or a new Word document, and we’re ready to practice.

Now what?

Unlike well-established fields like sports or music, there are no widely accepted practice techniques for writing. That means it’s up to us to figure out what works, and a major part of this blog will be testing different exercises and posting the results.

Fortunately, we don’t have to start entirely from scratch. Anders Ericsson’s research has identified three elements that are critical for any practice to be effective. He incorporated them into deliberate practice, and says:

  1. Deliberate practice focuses on specific goals and develops lesson plans to reach them bit by bit.
  2. Deliberate practice pushes you beyond your current abilities.
  3. Deliberate practice takes focus.

Dr. Ericsson details why these elements are important in chapter 2 of Peak, so if you want the full scientific explanation I’d recommend starting there. But for now, the short and simple version is this: the human brain is highly adaptive and reacts to the pressures placed on it. To improve a skill, you need to pressure your brain enough that it has to change to accommodate the new strain.

Why do you need specific goals? Because without a goal you’re not driving your brain to adjust in any particular way. The practice has to push beyond your current abilities because over time your brain gets used to performing at a certain level. To keep improving you have to break out of the plateau. Finally, if you’re not really focusing on the task at hand, your brain is not under pressure and won’t need to make adjustments.

So with these three elements in mind, what are we actually going to do to practice? We’ll start by looking at a case where a man succeeded in becoming a great writer through practice: the story of Benjamin Franklin.

 

Benjamin Franklin Learns to Write:

Anders Ericsson explains how Benjamin Franklin learned to write starting on page 155 of Peak.  But Benjamin Franklin himself tells the story in chapter 2 of his autobiography, which happens to be available for free online. Since we all have access to the source material, I’ll be working from the autobiography.

The story starts like this. Franklin bought a copy of the Spectator, a London journal of satirical and political essays. After reading it, he says,

I thought the writing excellent, and wished, if possible, to imitate it. With this view I took some of the papers, and, making short hints of the sentiment in each sentence, laid them by a few days, and then, without looking at the book, try’d to compleat the papers again, by expressing each hinted sentiment at length, and as fully as it had been expressed before, in any suitable words that should come to hand. Then I compared my Spectator with the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected them.

This is the first practice technique I’ll try, which for the sake of convenience I’m calling the Hints Exercise. When I find a particularly excellent scene, description, conversation, or any other piece of a story, I’ll write myself short notes about each part of it. Then, after a few days without looking at my notes, I’ll use them to try to recreate what I studied. When I’m finished I’ll compare my work to the original and make corrections as needed.

Benjamin Franklin used the hints exercise to improve his writing technique, but I’m also going to try using it for studying plot. Trying to rewrite an entire story would be absurdly time consuming, so I’ll start by writing a summary the book or movie that I want to study, making sure to include all the key events in the plot. I’ll write my hints based on the summary, and after a few days I’ll use the hints to reconstruct the plotline. I’ll compare my reconstruction to my summary, make any corrections, and repeat.

As a side note, you may notice that Benjamin Franklin’s approach includes elements of deliberate practice beyond the three we’re looking at in this post. Specifically, he found experts to emulate, spent time analyzing what made those experts successful, and worked to improve specific areas of weakness. While a lot of the terminology surrounding deliberate practice is fairly new, I find it reassuring that Franklin was applying the core ideas as far back as the 1700’s.

Back to the text:

I also sometimes jumbled my collections of hints into confusion, and after some weeks endeavored to reduce them into the best order, before I began to form the full sentences and compleat the paper. This was to teach me method in the arrangement of thoughts.

This is the second practice technique I’ll use, which I’m calling the Structure Exercise. Just like Franklin says, I’ll jumble up the notes I took for the hints exercise, then try to put them back in order. If I get the order wrong, I’ll note the mistakes and keep trying until I can successfully recreate the structure of the original work.

This technique may seem like simple memorization, and some people may be tempted to skip it under the assumption that they can always just refer back to their notes. For example, after identifying the 14 key events in a good romance plot, they could simply keep their notes handy while writing and make sure their story hits the events in the right order.

I think this would be a major mistake. Our goal is not simply to mimic the structure of great writing, it’s to understand why that structure helped make the writing great. Writing is fundamentally about communicating ideas to another human being, and a critical part of that is organizing our thoughts in a way that’s easy to understand. By internalizing the writing and plot structures used by many different authors we’ll learn how successful writers organize their work. Over time, we’ll figure out what parts of the structures are universal and what are simply a matter of taste. When we know that, we’re well on the way to mastery. 

 

One More Technique:

Along with Franklin’s techniques I’m going to try one other exercise. It is:

 

The Storyboarding Exercise: After I’ve analyzed a number of different stories that all follow the same general arc (for example, a series of mysteries) I’ll outline their overall structure and write a number of story summaries which all adhere to it. I’ll write these summaries rapidly and in a fairly short period – say, one a day for a month. The goal of the exercise is threefold: to brainstorm many different story ideas, to drive home a successful story structure, and to force myself to create entire plotlines rather than just collections of scenes.

The storyboards can vary tremendously in characters, setting, and so on, as long as they follow the outline. Note: I’m not advocating writing a book that simply copies the events in other novels. Most likely none of these storyboards would be interesting as full length novels without a number of changes to pull them away from pure formula. Instead, my goal is to master the formulas and keep them as baselines – building blocks I can work from later while creating something unique.

 

From Franklin to Deliberate Practice:

Now that I’ve laid out the 3 practice techniques I’ll be starting with – the Hints, Structure, and Storyboarding exercises – let’s take a moment to make sure they have the three elements of deliberate practice I mentioned at the beginning of this post. As a reminder, the elements are:

  • Deliberate practice focuses on specific goals and develops lesson plans to reach them bit by bit.
  • Deliberate practice pushes you beyond your current abilities.
  • Deliberate practice takes focus.

The hints exercise has all three in spades. The specific goal is clear: to imitate the writing or plotline that I’m studying, and the constant comparisons with an original work should make it easy to track incremental improvements. So long as the writer I’m studying is better than I am (hardly difficult at this point), the exercise will by definition push me past my current abilities. Finally, striving to match the skill of a better writer will almost certainly take all my focus.  

For the structure exercise, I think this type of practice will be most useful when I’m first starting to study how great writers organize their work. It has a clear goal and takes focus, but as I memorize the common patterns it will probably stop regularly pushing me beyond my current abilities. But by then it will have served its purpose, and I’ll bring it back out any time I encounter a particularly unique piece of storytelling.

Finally, the storyboarding exercise. This exercise has a specific goal: learning to create many different stories while following a successful outline, and I should be able to tell if I’m improving over time simply by how hard it is to come up with a new story each day. If it gets easier over time – and the quality of the story summaries doesn’t noticeably decrease – it’s a good indication I’m getting better. There may come a day when the exercise no longer takes much focus or pushes me beyond my current abilities, but if I’m truly coming up with a unique story for each iteration, I suspect that time is a long ways off.

As I discover or create practice techniques that meet the requirements for deliberate practice I’ll try them out and post the results. But with just these three exercises I’ve got a huge amount of work to do, so I’m not in any hurry. I’m aiming to start regular writing practice in the next few weeks, but before that there’s still two more parts of deliberate practice that we need to discuss. The next post will focus on how we’ll get feedback. See you then.

Mental Representations: The Nuts and Bolts of Mastery

So what are mental representations, and how will they help us become great writers? Well, from page 58 of Peak:

 

“A mental representation is a mental structure that corresponds to an object, an idea, a collection of information, or anything else, concrete or abstract, that the brain is thinking about.”

 

That definition is a bit vague, so here’s an example to make it more concrete. Think about where you live. You have a fairly good idea of where everything is, right? If it was dark and I asked you to get a glass of water, you could probably do it without much of a problem.

Now imagine you were staying in a house you’d never visited before. If I asked you to do the same thing – get a glass of water in the dark – you’d probably have a much harder time. Even though you know the general requirements to complete the task, such as finding which cupboard the glasses are in and getting water from the sink, there’d be key details you’d struggle with. Which cupboard are the cups in? What type of faucet is it? And is there anything in the way that might- ow, my toe! Goddammit, where did that chair come from?

It’s the same request in both scenarios, so why is it easy in one and hard in the other? Simple: the mental representation you have of your house is excellent, and the representation of the unknown house is poor.

Our brains use mental representations for more than just facts. For example, while a pianist does need a strong mental representation of the raw notes in a song, they also need representations of where to put their hands and how much pressure to apply to a key. They even need representations of more ethereal things, such as how to shift the mood of a song by adjusting the speed, volume, and pedal work of their playing.

All that leads us to one of the most important findings in all of Dr. Ericsson’s work: mastering a skill simply means building really, really good mental representations of everything that goes into that skill.

Why is that important for writing? Because it explains how to become an expert. My first forays into creative writing were extremely frustrating; I could tell my writing was sub-par, but couldn’t understand why. Great writers clearly had something I didn’t, but besides their many years of practice I didn’t know what.

The idea of mental representations clarified the difference. A great writer’s mental representations of clear prose, story structure, and the characters, setting, and events in their story were all vastly superior to the representations I had of my own. I had a vague idea of the story I wanted to tell and how to write it, but like a person stumbling through an unknown house in the dark, my mental representations were not good enough to reach my goal without wasting time rifling through cabinets and banging my toe on a chair.

In addition to helping get it right the first time, when a person has good mental representations they can often notice their own mistakes, even without external feedback. If an expert pianist misses a note, they’ll usually realize it immediately because the sound they hear suddenly diverges from their representation of what the song should sound like. This sort of self monitoring requires that the practitioner already have high quality mental representations, so it’s not a good way to start learning a skill. But as the practitioner’s skills get more advanced it can become an invaluable tool for continuing improvement.

So now we have a clear goal: to make our mental representations as good as expert writer’s. How do we do that? With the subject of the next blog post: Practice.

Finding Success by Analyzing the Experts

“It is a mistake to think that the practice of my art has become easy to me. I assure you, dear friend, no one has given so much care to the study of composition as I. There is scarcely a famous master in music whose works I have not frequently and diligently studied.”

― Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

 

***

 

The Games of the Masters

Let’s say that you wanted to become a great chess player. How would you go about it? The obvious answer is by playing a lot of chess, but as you already know if you’ve read the previous post, that answer is wrong. As Anders Ericsson explains on page 56 of Peak:

“Anyone who is serious about developing skills on the chessboard will do it mainly by spending countless hours studying games played by the masters. You analyze a position in depth, predicting the next move, and if you get it wrong, you go back and figure out what you missed. Research has shown that the amount of time spent in this sort of analysis – not the amount of time spent playing chess with others – is the single most important predictor of a chess player’s ability.”

Before I learned about deliberate practice, I felt a strong stigma for studying another author’s writing. The thought of trying to emulate other people’s work smacked to me of plagiarism and a lack of creativity. I also didn’t terribly enjoy the literature study I did in school, so instead I just read what I liked and hoped I would somehow learn through osmosis.

That was a mistake. It’s obviously important not to rip off other people’s work, but there’s a big difference between study and theft. I believe there are . . . if not rules, at least patterns in what readers enjoy. If that’s correct, it means there’s a huge amount to learn through the focused study of excellent stories. Depending on how similar practicing writing is to practicing chess, this study might be even more important than spending time writing.

 

Learning to Study

So, analyzing stories. That means something like English class, right? Looking for symbolism, memorizing sonnets and all that?

Nope. That’s not what we’re doing here.

I like thinking about writing not as art, but as a trade. Our goal is to become master craftsmen, and just like apprentice electricians, plumbers, or mechanics, we need to learn the tools of our trade and how best to apply them. Any artistic flare is strictly secondary to doing a good job. So once we’ve found a story we want to study, our analysis should start with just one question: why is this story good?

There are many different analytic techniques, but in the name of simplicity I’m going to start by only looking at three things:

  1. What happened?
  2. Is it important?
  3. Why did the author do it?

With this basic analytical tool, I’m going to study two areas:

  1. The structure of the story. This includes what events happen in what order, how characters are developed, the themes the story explores, and so on.
  2. The author’s writing. This means dialogue, descriptions, word choice, vocabulary, and how the words appear on the page.

That’s it. Three questions applied to two areas. I might change or improve these later, but they already leave us with a huge amount to learn.

Let’s apply these to an example, something we’ll all know. How about . . . the first Star Wars film, A New Hope. If we’re looking at the structure, we see that the film opens with “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away,” then presents a giant block of text giving background information on the universe.

Awesome. We have a thing that happened. Now, is it important? (When analyzing story structure, this could also be rephrased as, “Would the story have worked without it?”)

Possibly. That might sound like a wishy-washy answer, but bear with me for a second. Until I’ve built a solid foundation by analyzing a number of different stories, I can’t yet say how important that particular introduction is. Maybe it’s critical to do some worldbuilding right at the beginning to start getting the audience invested. Maybe it’s a matter of taste, or only important for some types of story. Or maybe it’s actually a bad idea, and the rest of the film had to make up for the early mistake. I don’t know yet, so I’ll mark it as a data point and keep the question in mind while I keep studying and see if I can develop an answer.

Now for the last question, “Why did the author do it?” In this example it’s pretty simple: George Lucas wanted to give the audience a bunch of information about the Star Wars universe right at the start of the film. Once we’ve established that fact, we can use it to refine our own writing by asking follow up questions like, “Did it accomplish his goal?” and, “Was there a better way to do it?” As we find different authors trying to accomplish the same goal in different ways, we can start comparing their techniques to find what works best, and when.

Now that we have our analytical outline, all that’s left is to decide who we’re studying.

 

Finding our Yodas

There’s an unbelievable number of excellent books out there, so you could spend your entire life analyzing stories with no danger of running out of material. At the end of the day, the biggest part of deciding who to study comes down to personal preference. When you think of a writer and say, “Man, I wish I was a tenth as good as they are,” put them on your list.

As my Star Wars example may have given away, I’ll also be analyzing some movies. I’m including movies because I think a good film needs to hit all the same story points as a good book – just in a more condensed format – so great movies should have at least as much to teach as great books. This may turn out to be incorrect, but even if that’s the case, learning why it’s incorrect will be valuable.

As we pick what to study, there are two general approaches I can think of:

The first is to pick a type of story you want to learn. Maybe you love a genre, like romance, crime thriller, or space opera. Or you can also be more general, and try to learn plotlines like Overcoming the Monster, or Rags to Riches. With this approach, you’d find the best examples you can of the type of story you want to learn and study them all. Because it focuses more on the type of story than the author’s writing, this probably lends itself to studying story structure more than writing technique. (But that doesn’t mean you should ignore the author’s writing while you’re doing it!)

The second is to pick an author whose work you love and study them specifically. With this approach you’d find a writer you admire and want to emulate, then dig deep into what makes them so good at what they do. Because this approach focuses on just one writer, it’s probably a better way to study their specific writing techniques than overall story structure.

These two approaches are absolutely not exclusive, and I expect we’ll swap back and forth as we find weaknesses and work to correct them. I lay out what I’m going to start by focusing on in this post, but before we get into that, we’ve only looked at the first element of deliberate practice. Next, we need to understand exactly what we’re hoping to gain with all this analysis and the practice that comes after. The answer, and the title of the next blog post, is Mental Representations.

Deliberate Practice: A New Approach to Writing

Deliberate practice is the brainchild of Dr. Anders Ericsson, a researcher and psychologist out of Florida State University. His research focuses on what makes experts so good at what they do,  and more importantly for us, finding the best techniques for those looking to improve.  He published a book about his findings called Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, and in it he outlines an approach to practice that his research has found is the most effective way for any person to improve any skill. He calls this technique deliberate practice.

The book is an invaluable resource that I’m going to reference throughout the blog. If you have even a slight interest in improving your skill at anything, go buy it. This is what my copy looks like:

 

Yellow tags mean important info, blue tags mean something that’s just awesome.

 

So what makes deliberate practice different from the traditional author’s path? Well, let’s start by laying out how I previously tried to improve my writing. Based on advice I received, books on writing, and my understanding of how successful authors had started out, my former approach looked something like this:

  1. Start by reading a lot. Between reading and my normal education, I expected to learn the basics of grammar, vocabulary, story structure, and so on.
  2. Begin writing something. I was told not to worry if it’s bad, just get the words on paper.
  3. Do some editing. I did as much editing as I could on my own, then sent my work for a round or two through friends and family. A writer’s circle would have been helpful, but I never found one I wanted to join.
  4. Based on their feedback, edit some more. I repeated steps 3 and 4 until I felt like the story was finished . . . or at least wasn’t going to get any better.
  5. Submit the story to magazines, publishers, or agents. I’d been warned that rejections are common, so I gritted my teeth and submitted my work as broadly as possible.
  6. Get rejection letters. Once it was clear no one was interested, I started on a new project.

This approach has a few components of deliberate practice (specifically getting feedback) but overall it’s what Dr. Ericsson calls ‘naive practice.’ Naive practice can be summed up as doing the same thing over and over and hoping that brute repetition will eventually lead to improvement.

But here’s the problem: naive practice doesn’t work. Dr. Ericsson’s most compelling example of this is on page 131 of Peak. It goes something like this: who do you think generally has better patient outcomes? Physicians with 5 years of experience, or physicians with 20 years of experience?

If naive practice worked, a physician with 20 years of experience should be vastly more successful than a physician with just 5. But even after controlling for variables like outdated knowledge or old techniques, the data showed just the opposite. If anything, the 20 year physician has slightly worse patient outcomes. Far from improving the doctor’s overall competence, rote practice of the same tasks seems to slightly decrease effectiveness over time. And this is not a unique case. Dr. Ericsson addresses naive practice thoroughly in Peak and his results are conclusive: repetition alone will not make us better writers.

So, what does work? Dr. Ericsson has spent decades trying to answer that question, and the end result is deliberate practice. The techniques that define deliberate practice are not necessarily new or novel; many fields, particularly highly developed ones like sports, music, or chess, have used some or all of them for centuries. But Dr. Ericsson’s work has identified and organized these best practices, and we now have the chance to apply them to tasks outside of these highly developed fields – like writing.

If you want the full list of what makes deliberate practice head to page 99 of Peak. These were my key takeaways:

  • Deliberate practice is based on expert performers of the desired skill. Rather than trying to learn a skill from scratch, deliberate practice begins by asking who the best performers are in a given field, then finding out what makes them so good. Once you know that, you can design practice techniques that build towards a clear goal.
  • Deliberate practice builds strong mental representations. Mental representations are a huge part of Dr. Ericsson’s work and I’ll go into more detail about them in a future post. For now, the key takeaway is that experts must develop a detailed understanding of the correct way to do each individual element their skill. For example, to play a song a violinist must have a clear mental representation of how the song is supposed to sound, along with mental representations of how to hold the instrument, how much pressure to apply with the bow, and each of the movements that will make the instrument produce the desired notes. The better the violinist’s mental representations are, the better they will play.
  • Deliberate practice focuses on specific goals and develops lesson plans to reach them bit by bit. Vaguely trying to ‘get better’ isn’t helpful. Deliberate practice breaks a skill into its component pieces, then focuses on making incremental improvements to areas of weakness.
  • Deliberate practice pushes you beyond your current abilities. Practicing a skill at a level you’re comfortable with does not lead to improvement no matter how much time you spend on it. If you’re going to get better, the practice needs to push you outside your comfort zone.
  • Deliberate practice takes focus. Working on skills beyond your current abilities takes intense focus and effort. If you’re not giving the practice your full attention it’s very unlikely that you’ll improve. The effort required often means that deliberate practice is not very fun.
  • Feedback is critical. You need some way of measuring if your practice techniques are working. A teacher is usually the best option, since they can both identify weaknesses and recommend ways to improve. However, if one isn’t available you can use things like scores, quizzes, or comparisons to expert performers to determine if you’re getting better.
  • Finally, you must have the discipline to commit to practice long-term. Truly mastering a skill takes tens of thousands of hours, so developing the discipline to keep at it month after month, year after year, is just as important as knowing the right ways to practice.

The differences between deliberate practice and my past approach are pretty stark. When I started writing I didn’t spend any time trying to understand what makes some writing better than others or why I enjoyed the work of my favorite authors. Without that, I had no plan for how to improve. I just wrote a lot and relied on feedback from readers. Some of that feedback was excellent, but it’s not enough to make up for total lack of planning. Without knowing what I needed to improve or how to improve it, forward progress was mostly just luck. Most damning of all, I worked in fits and starts, with my longest project lasting about a year. Working steadily for a year isn’t bad, but the several months before and after it where I did next to no writing were not.

So I’ve recognized there’s a problem, and now it’s time to fix it. But there’s still a major hurdle, and it’s that there aren’t well established practice techniques for writing. The best ways to practice the violin have been developed and refined over several hundred years, but bringing deliberate practice to writing is going to take some experimentation. This blog is a lab where we’ll figure out what works and start crafting the tools we need to practice writing correctly. The next 5 blog posts will more detail on each part of deliberate practice, and after that I’ll start applying the techniques to my own work and post the results. You can find a full list of my posts on deliberate practice here.

So with that, step one is to identify the expert performers I want to emulate and analyze what makes them so good. You can read on in Analyzing the Experts.